


Bienvenue à Vérone

by WildandWhirling



Category: Romeo & Juliette - Toho Stage, Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Romeo et Juliette - Presgurvic
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Grief, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:00:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24941965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildandWhirling/pseuds/WildandWhirling
Summary: “I don’t want to leave him alone,” Benvolio Montague says, with a voice that is faint, broken, but absolutely determined. “With Romeo gone, he’ll think-“ He buries his head in Mercutio’s hair then, muffling his sobs. Escalus can't find it in himself to remind him that Mercutio is dead. He is beyond thinking of anything at the moment.As both sides of the feud go to mourn their losses, Escalus and Benvolio are left to mourn Mercutio.
Relationships: Benvolio & Escalus (Romeo and Juliet), Mercutio/Benvolio Montague
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40





	Bienvenue à Vérone

**Author's Note:**

> I have been without internet, to various extents, for the last two weeks, and so I decided to rewatch parts of the Toho RetJ, as you do, and saw Mercutio's death scene and was like "So, I know we see the Montagues taking Mercutio's body out, but what if I made it MORE depressing?" and so a fic was born.

Neither Montague nor Capulet cared for Mercutio enough to stay, so wrapped up in their own losses. To the Capulets, he’d always been a nuisance. (He was _young_ , he’d have grown eventually. Had he been given the chance.) To the Montagues…they loved him, but with their best hope for the future exiled to Mantua…well, they had other things on their mind. They would mourn his loss, in their time, but they had another loss to mourn, another grief to bear.

Lord and Lady Montague leave, Lady Montague clinging onto her husband as if a sudden breeze might blow her away, close in step to Lord and Lady Capulet, who walk at least a foot apart from one another. (Escalus still remembers their wedding, how proud they both were then, her from the wealth and position she was set to marry into, him from the combination of the wine and marrying what everyone agreed was the most beautiful woman in Verona at the time. He’s not sure he would recognize them if he hadn’t seen the years eat away at them in person.)

Everyone is gone.

Everyone save for Benvolio Montague, who continues to clutch onto the corpse as if it’s a rag doll. Blood pools from beneath where Mercutio’s body fell, soaking and staining the younger man’s hands.

“I don’t want to leave him alone,” Benvolio Montague says, with a voice that is faint, broken, but absolutely determined. “With Romeo gone, he’ll think-“ He buries his head in Mercutio’s hair then, muffling his sobs. Escalus can't find it in himself to remind him that Mercutio is dead. He is beyond thinking of anything at the moment.

A sick feeling edges its way into Escalus’ stomach. The sun, blaring its way through the haze that has long since become commonplace in the city, that has never loosened, feels like it is too hot, too smothering. The asphalt ground below them sweaters, the high concrete buildings above looming but providing nothing in the way of shade.

This is wrong.

Romeo Montague shouldn’t be exiled. (The words of banishment echo in his mind. The look of despair on that young man’s face…he’s seen things during his time. Things that he’ll never forget. But when he arrives at the gates of Heaven, he believes that one of the first things that St. Peter will show him is a picture of Romeo Montague’s face when he was told that he would never get to see his friends or family again, followed by the screams of his mother. He is certain that it will play in his mind for the rest of his life, like one of the old films that they used to make in the days when the human race could create such lavish luxuries, the old movies he'd once scrambled onto his father's lap to watch when he came home after a long day and slumped in his chair.)

Tybalt Capulet shouldn’t be dead. (On the few occasions he had visited the Capulet house, the times where Lord Capulet absolutely couldn't be refused, he remembered him as a surly boy, older than his years, with a sharpened reserve. A little too aggressive towards any perceived slights, with a face often littered with bruises and scratches, some of them with very recognizable counterparts on Mercutio, but...he didn't think he was looking at his nephew's murderer.)

His nephew shouldn’t be dead. (What happened to him, he wondered? The little boy that had once made him feel like the most important person in the world just by sitting by his side, legs swinging off the chair as he asked him questions? The little boy who used that to his advantage to put whoopie cushions under his seat at every opportunity and then tried to blame Paris for it when it was discovered? The little boy who had loved chemistry, at least insofar as it taught him how to blow things up, though Escalus knew he would deny it if asked in later years? The little boy who he'd promised his brother that he would protect if something should happen to him, though, at the time, he had thought he was worrying too much? The little boy who had learned to pick the lock to every single door in his house within a year of moving in there?) 

Benvolio Montague shouldn’t be crying over his corpse. (Mercutio had never formally told him that they were together, Escalus had never pried, but there had never been a doubt. When he caught them in the middle of an intense kissing session on his much-beloved couch in the early hours of the morning, Benvolio nearly hitting the ceiling and Mercutio leaning back in the couch with a level of insolent indifference that had to be practiced, arm propping up his head lazily....well. That had only been confirmation. He'd quietly wished them the best before running back to his room with as much dignity as he could muster, the glass of water he'd gone to get totally forgotten.) 

This shouldn’t be-

He shouldn’t be seeing _this_ , his head refusing to admit what his own eyes seeing because it’s like a horrible, distorted view of the real world, not something that is happening in front of him.

He shouldn’t be looking down on all of this like an unfeeling god on a bright summer day, with just him and Benvolio Montague on a deserted street, Mercutio’s broken body between them, the words that decided Romeo Montague’s fate still fresh on his cracked lips.

  
  
Everything he's done in his life, it was for Verona. His wonderful city, which has been his first love and only child all his life, nurtured, coddled, and scolded in equal measure, where men and women alike fall to sleep every night with daggers hidden beneath their pillows and a name can be a death sentence. 

Verona had dragged itself to its own two feet after the Great Explosion, only to what? Cannibalize itself from the inside out? They had created a society for their children and grandchildren to live in, and then gave them knives and told them to fight and kill one another. They had given them a beautiful city, still half-wrecked, still a shell of itself, but one that they had built into and around, and then told them to set it on fire. Generation after generation, day by day. And what then? What did they have?

A river of blood, never-ending. And however he tries to stop the flow, it pushes on, inescapable, implacable.

At this point, he might very well drown in it.

At this point, he's not sure why he doesn't. 

“He won’t be,” Escalus forces the words to form, because he knows that they need to be, because he has been trained his entire life to force words through even when his throat is parched and numb and heavy. He tries to nod reassuringly, but Benvolio Montague only shakes his head, stroking Mercutio’s hair before pressing his forehead against his.

“Don’t make me leave him.” 

Valentine and Paris still don't know. They haven't heard. And he should call them, he knows that it's his responsibility to, he needs to prepare the words to say to them, but he can't begin to. He can barely tell _himself_ , let alone them. 

Escalus kneels down, his clean gray coat mixing with the filth of the street, the blood that still hasn’t yet dried. He shakes his head. “I won’t.”

The boy must see him as a tyrant, at this point.

(Perhaps he’s right to.)

He wants to smooth out Mercutio’s hair (always such a _mess_ , even as a child, never quite standing where it should), but that is firmly covered by Benvolio Montague, and he doesn’t have it in him to pry him away. (He is not sure, prince or no, that Benvolio Montague would let him anyway, there is something feral in that boy. Perhaps that is why Mercutio loved him so, their two streaks of wildness speaking to one another.) Instead, he just takes his pale, limp hand and squeezes it in apology.

_Forgive me._

_Forgive me for whatever mistake led me to this point._

_Forgive me for whatever will happen because of it._

_Forgive-_

A sob rips out of his chest, uncontrollable, raw, his throat sore and aching from the effort of unsuccessfully forcing them down. The sob that the Prince of Verona could never release in public, where he must be the law. Where he must give decisions to angry, grief-stricken people even if his heart is breaking in his chest, when he had thought that it had long since passed that point. (His grandfather, his mother, his father, his brother, his sister in law...he had thought that his heart was numbed from loss at this point. And then, with each one, he was faced with the realization that it wasn't so worn that it couldn't feel as if someone had actually ripped it out of his chest and used it as their personal stress ball.) 

When he wants nothing better than to sit in his study and lock the door for a week. Not let anyone in. Just sit in his old chair and do _nothing_. What would it really change, anyway? They don't listen to him. They don't care. 

The sobs roll out, one after another, his breath betraying him with a new one just when he thinks that it might be done and that he has successfully forced them down. Benvolio reaches towards him, but restrains himself, returning to stroking Mercutio’s hair in perfect silence, pressing a kiss to a forehead that had long since turned as chilly as the grave.

Mercutio had known, hadn’t he? He had known that he’d loved him? That, beneath his occasional growling about some of his lifestyle choices, there was a concern for him? That he had only ever wanted him to be his best self? He wants to ask the boy near him, but the words die in his mouth, and he swallows them along with the sobs. He has other things on his mind than the worries of a tired, old man.

Mercutio does not have a funeral, Montague and Capulet alike too buried in their grief to be able to pay attention to a boy who was neither.

Instead, it is just Escalus and Benvolio, silently marking the hours until the dawn, when they can begin to go on and stitch their lives back together.


End file.
